Pro-wrestling star Viktor, who is best known for his run in the tag team The Ascension with WWE, was recently profiled by SLAM! Wrestling to answer a bunch of pro-wrestling related questions, including how the former NXT tag champion nearly quit the business after getting released from WWE, and how negative his experience was working there. Highlights are below.
Doesn’t believe he’ll ever return to WWE:
No, never. It’s hard to say never, and I won’t go into why because it only partially has to do with us and our past experience, but my definitive no is a more personal reason. It’s not that I wouldn’t be happy to ever get to call and say, ‘Hey, guys, want to come back?’ But I’m pretty sure that answer will always be no. A line was crossed and it wasn’t crossed to either of us, it was due to a different situation and it caused me to lose complete and utter respect or to ever have any desire to work there again.
Says that he really didn’t want to wrestle anymore because his final months at WWE were so miserable:
I didn’t want to wrestle anymore, honestly. I was very jaded and so clouded, there was nothing but negative that came out of me when I thought about wrestling and I needed to get rid of that before I could even start to do anything again. We were both so miserable at the end of our contracts. We were not in a rush to go call up our friends and be like, ‘Hey, can we have some jobs?’
How he doesn’t want to call a friend and ask for a job:
I knew I was going to get asked this because I usually don’t answer this properly or probably looks bad the way I usually answer this question. The best thing I can say is with where we were left in WWE, I’m not calling up a friend to ask for a job. Konnor is on the same page as me. I’ve said to him, ‘If you want me to make a call, I’ll make a call.’ I don’t think either of us want to make the call because we are restarting ourselves more or less.